Review: Front Mission 4 (PS2)

This was my full-price game purchase of the summer. I wasn’t willing to wait for this one to show up on the cheap rack. Besides, turn-based strategy games are usually produced in such small quantities that you never find them there. Forty-eight game play hours and a month later (almost to the day), I’ve completed it. I must say I’m glad I bought it.

This is how strategy games were meant to be. Long missions that seem to move quickly, diverse units that are fully customizable, cooperative attacks, air strikes, weather and time of day modifiers, beautiful graphics and perfect sound engineering all work together to make this one of the most enjoyable and non-frustrating yet challenging turn-based strategy game I’ve played.

You follow two seemingly separate storylines that converge late in the game. After playing for a while as Elsa, a female French soldier who has just joined a wanzer research group called the Durandal (wanzers are the robotic suits everyone battles in) and is beginning to uncover a conspiracy to instigate war and create a resource dependence, the focus switches to Darril, a lazy U.C.S. soldier with a sweet mullet who deserts his post after he and his buddies find a crate containing twenty-five million dollars worth of gold in a crashed cargo plane in the war-torn Venezuelan countryside. Periodically you switch back and forth between the two groups of fighters as the plot unfolds. This breaks up the monotony and manages to tell a fairly interesting tale in the process.

The Front Mission game play has been tweaked almost to perfection. Previously you could have only four units on the field at once. Now you can occasionally have as many as twelve. Coordinated attacks make the battles go faster and increase the variety of strategies you can plan. Loss of units and/or parts result in a “repair bill” that is deducted from your total cash reward at the end of each mission. Thankfully, you can designate certain units to wear repair backpacks and keep your wanzers in tip-top shape if you’re careful.

The only complaint I have is one that I have with all turn-based strategy games: Why do you have to move, then attack? Why can’t you attack and then move, or maybe even move a little, attack, and then move again? I guess it might make the game too easy, because you’d never leave your units in harm’s way, or possibly too hard because the enemy would use the same tactic.

Anyway, this game is great. I could wish for a few more missions (there are around 30), a little more interaction outside of combat, and maybe a few more missions where the goal was more than simply, “Destroy all enemy units,” but these are more my wish list for Front Mission 5 than complaints.

I can’t wait for the next installment, but I don’t know if I can recommend this game to you. Enjoyment of this game definitely requires a refined taste. After watching me play for a while, my friend Smitty said, “Is that all this game is? That looks pretty boring.” Bah. He probably never liked chess or Risk, either.

Comments

[Momotaro]

Smitty doesn't like Chess? Blasphemy!

I dug the look of the game, and I'm sure that if I was playing it I would have enjoyed it. But my problem is I have the attention span of a gerbel, so any hopes of me playing a game for 40+ hours are useless. I've yet to finish Metroid. What does that tell you?

[mwest]

Having actually watched Superpope play more turn based strategy games than most people will ever physically play, I feel compelled to agree with him that this game is truly superior. Turn based strategy is a very narrow genre, in my opinion, much like ska or blues music. Individuals that say it all sounds the same are right... but that's why enthusiasts like it. Enthusiasts enjoy it because they've acquired a taste for that specific genre.

[Patrick]

Ska = Polka without the accordion.

[Momotaro]

I prefer to think of it as Big Band with a frantic beat.

[SuperPope]

I think Ska actually originated as a British reggae/swing hybrid, but eventually became just "music with a brass section that teenagers enjoy." You couldn't use that definition in the 80s, though, because you'd have been forced to include Chicago...

[choppi]

I thought it was a kind of punk with brass. At least I think that's what Ron King said it was.

[Momotaro]

I like that. It's like the Clash combined with a bunch of trumpets and trombones.

[Smitty]

Chess? Risk? Turn Based strategy? What a bunch of crap. Yeah Chess is fun.... for me to poop on. I am not really into the Ska either. I can't really put my finger on it. We have already had the discussions about Five Iron and Brave Saint so I will just leave it at that. All I know is that watching you play that game was like watching a round of Golf on TV.